JFK Airport Freezes, Floods, and Leads to Travel Chaos

"Residual delays." It's a euphemism, almost poetic in how it rolls off the tongue, for the inconveniences that mount in the wake of an unforeseen weather event at a major airport; say, a "bomb cyclone" winter storm, for example. Some airports around the world are better equipped than others to deal with the backlog of canceled flights, the hordes of stranded passengers, and the strain on the facility's infrastructure that follow events like Thursday's Winter Storm Grayson. New York's JFK International Airport, as this weekend clearly demonstrated, is decidedly not one of those airports.

After the airport was shut down on Thursday, January 4 due to white-out weather conditions, it reopened on Friday morning, but the problems weren't over. Passengers, including this writer, spent hours on the tarmac upon landing at the airport on Friday and Saturday, due to below freezing conditions incapacitating ground equipment and heavy traffic from a barrage of flights making up for the cancellations. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK along with LaGuardia and Newark International, attributed the gridlock traffic to “a backlog of flights that has resulted in a reduction in gate space,” in a statement shared with the New York Times. For but one example of what that really means, an Air China plane that arrived into JFK just after midnight on Saturday spent seven (yes, seven) hours on the tarmac before passengers were able to deplane.

Those looking to get out of the city also faced major delays and frustrations. Christine Amorose Merrill, a travel and lifestyle blogger, was scheduled to fly home from New York to San Diego on Thursday morning on a JetBlue flight. It looked as if she was going to just miss the storm, but the plane never left the gate. "We then sat through six straight hours of the flight being pushed back: first it was scheduled for 11 a.m., and then 1 p.m., and then 3 p.m., and then 5 p.m.," she says. Finally, her flight was canceled and she was put on a flight on Tuesday. But there was still the issue of getting her checked bags off the plane. "The baggage claim was complete chaos. They weren't using any of the screens to indicate what carousel was being used for what flight," she says. "They would make announcements over an intercom, but you couldn't hear it in all parts of the baggage claim." She waited four hours to finally get her bags: an argument for always carrying on, if we've ever heard one.

While Merrill had no such luck, some passengers did manage to get on flights out of the city over the weekend. But traffic on the airport's tarmac was exacerbated early on Saturday morning, when a China Southern plane, being towed, hit a Kuwait Airways plane lined up for takeoff, causing damage to both vessels. No injuries were reported, and all passengers were successfully evacuated, but it led to even more delays.

In addition, those who were able to get off their planes were faced with long waits for baggage, like that faced by Merrill—for some, those bags never came, and they left empty-handed after waiting for hours. On Saturday, Port Authority blamed the issues on "the continued bitter cold and resulting ground equipment issues.”

Images posted to social media showed the arrivals terminal stacked with unclaimed bags, while other passengers sat on stationary carousels. Passengers reported waits of up to five hours for luggage to be delivered from planes onto the carousels.

And then very bad went to unimaginably worse. On Sunday, a water main broke in JFK's Terminal 4, a major arrival point for international flights, flooding the baggage claim and forcing the airport to temporarily evacuate the terminal and shut down arrivals for four hours. Baggage carousels stopped moving, arriving flights were diverted, and entire sections of the arrivals terminal were roped off while staff cleared the water. Power was also cut off temporarily as a safety precaution; footage taken in the afternoon shows water cascading from the ceiling and workers wading shin-deep in water. The cause of the break is unknown, and the Port Authority is investigating. "What happened at JFK Airport is unacceptable, and travelers expect and deserve better," Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton said at a news conference on Sunday.

While the situation has, at least relatively speaking, been brought under control, delays continue at JFK, and passengers are being urged to check with their airlines for flight statuses before heading to the airport. As of Monday afternoon, 62 flights have been delayed out of JFK, and 20 canceled. Arrivals at Terminal 4 have reopened as of 7:45 p.m. yesterday, but there are, of course, those residual delays to deal with.

Hitting hour two on the tarmac upon arriving at JFK on Friday night, my British Airways pilot took to the PA to call the situation a "comedy of errors," describing a line of planes circling aimlessly looking for parking. But for the thousands of passengers facing canceled flights, elusive bags, and a flooded arrival terminal, all with temperatures well below freezing, there has been very little to laugh about. At least there's nowhere for the airport to go but up in 2018.